fluttered uncontrollably and was tongue-tied, but although neither of the pair could find the words, both knew there was much to be said between them. They were inseparable – the girl next door, so shy and so young, and Dorando, the boy who was winning a reputation to be proud of because of his other passion, for running. For as long as they could, they kept their friendship secret. But others could see, from the looks that lingered too long, what was going on.
Teresa’s mother would squint through the shutters, looking out for the messenger boy.
‘Look at his clothes,’ she would say to Teresa. ‘Why do you bother talking to someone like that? He’s poor and he’ll always be poor.’
Teresa’s eyes would swell with hot tears, and she bit her lip when her father told Dorando to stay away from her.
But Melli’s family, the owners of the shop, liked the girl. ‘Where’s the harm?’ said Melli, and so the lovers would snatch forbidden time together, keeping their secrets. Teresa was so proud of Dorando – she loved to see his name printed in Luce and she could see how happy that made him. She let him touch her and kiss her, and only the blushes would make him pull back, and he ached whenever he was away from her.
‘If I can be a champion, maybe it will help me to a fine job,’ Dorando would dream. ‘They know all about me at the hat factory – perhaps there’s something there for me.’ Teresa let him dream on.
Dorando certainly made sure that his dream of Teresa didn’t die. One morning, when he was away in Turin doing his national service, Teresa received a picture postcard. It was addressed in a neat copperplate hand to Gentil Signorina Dondi Teresina, Via S. Giovanni, Carpi. On the front was printed, ‘A thought from Turin’, and it carried a picture of a flower against the background of the city’s main railway station. There was no message, no greeting and no signature. Teresa looked at the card with a blush and a shrug. Twenty minutes later, she was at the Melli home, alone in the kitchen with the kettle steaming and trembling on the hob. As the steam softened the paste on the stamp, she gently peeled it off.
There, written in a tiny hand for her eyes only, was a message: ‘This is Dorando writing to remind you that he loves you, please forgive me for what happened when we were last together.’
Teresa read it again and again, and kept the card beside her until her dying day.
There is a copse behind the solid Victorian buildings of Charterhouse School, near Godalming in rural Surrey. It’s where generations of boys from the school, free from the shackles of classroom rules, could run a little wild and indulge their dreams and fantasies. It was here, as Wyndham Halswelle’s mother constantly reminded him, that you could find the first playground of a boy who went to the same school: the soldier, hero and role model of every schoolboy in the Empire – Robert Baden-Powell. They were, as she so often mentioned in her letters, old boys from Charterhouse.
The acts of ingenuity, courage and resourcefulness of Baden-Powell during the seven-month siege of Mafeking during the Boer War were followed in every detail throughout Britain and the Empire, and made a deep impression on Halswelle. Beyond that, the philosophy and ethos that Baden-Powell carried over into the Boy Scout Movement captured the imagination of generations of schoolboys to come.
Baden-Powell never really shone much at school subjects but he thrived at Charterhouse, where the public school ethos of cheerful courage under pressure, loyalty to the team and playing the game, which was already fuelling the armies of the Empire, suited this energetic sportsman, artist and actor.
‘The whole secret of success in life is to play the game of life in the same spirit as that played on the football field,’ he was fond of telling his audience of boys.
When war was declared in South Africa, Colonel Baden-Powell and 1,000 men were left to defend the town of Mafeking, which was the supply centre for the British. The town’s success in surviving the longest siege in that war, from October 1899 until May 1900, without any real loss of life, would in any case have elevated the name of Baden-Powell to the status of an imperial symbol, the hero of an empire under threat. But it wasn’t just his ability to succeed, it was his capacity to do so with nonchalance and a taste for fun and adventure, using a combination of fake barbed-wire defences and Sunday baby competitions, that in the eyes of the British public turned him into the very epitome of pluck and team spirit. A master of bluff, Baden-Powell thought up all sorts of schemes to make it seem as if the town of Mafeking was heavily defended.
When ordered to South Africa, his task was to raise two regiments of mounted rifles and to use them to hold the Western frontier of the Transvaal, drawing Boer forces away from the British landings on the coast. With his men, he became trapped in Mafeking, 250 miles away from the nearest reinforcements. Almost immediately, he was faced with a Boer force four or five times greater than his own and while they must have expected a quick and easy victory, they were to be disappointed.
As well as digging a strong set of defensive earthworks, Baden-Powell missed no opportunity to trick his opponents about his strength and intentions. Imitation forts were built, complete with a prominent flag and flagstaff to draw the fire of the enemy. Not only this, but he issued orders for non-existent assault troops attacking at night. He used a tin megaphone to make sure enemy sentries heard him and he managed to rouse the Boer camp while his own men got some sleep. He also improvised a searchlight and managed to con the Boers into thinking that all his forts were equipped with a searchlight.
One of his best schemes was to have a lasting significance. He recruited a bunch of boys to act as messengers and orderlies in order to release men to fight on the front line. This corps of boys was to provide the blueprint for the original Boy Scouts.
The Boers were sufficiently discouraged to abandon any hope of taking the town by assault, and settled down for a long siege. As the trench lines drew closer, a battle of snipers, as bitter as anything to be found on the Western front a decade and a half later, followed. But the siege was also a quite civilised affair: a ceasefire was observed every Sunday and the garrison amused themselves with concerts and cricket matches.
One day, a Boer gunner fired a letter into the town of Mafeking in an empty shell case, wishing that he had something with which to drink the health of the garrison. Baden-Powell immediately sent him a bottle of whisky under a flag of truce. Later, the Boer commander sent Baden-Powell a note that he and his friends were proposing to come into town and take them on at a game of cricket. Baden-Powell replied with panache: under the flag of truce he sent a letter that read:
Sir, I beg to thank you for your letter of yesterday. I should like nothing better after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days not out against the bowling of Cronje, Snijman and Botha and we are having a very enjoyable game.
I remain, yours truly,
RSS Baden-Powell
But the tide of war was slowly turning against the Boers and eventually it was all over. The long-awaited relief column arrived on 17 May 1900 and helped Baden-Powell’s ragged defenders drive out the Boer forces. It was the end of a siege that had lasted 216 days at the cost of 212 killed and wounded. But Baden-Powell was a national hero and endowed with a celebrity he was later to build on as founder of the Boy Scout Movement.
Prompted
